An Unarmed Peer into About Elly:
A Basic Investigation into its ‘Content’ and ‘Form’
By
Daryush Feizollahnezhad
Below is a simple attempt at a critical evaluation of a hit in Persian cinema, About Elly, as part of the practice of literary criticism debates, though it has peeled itself off the technical terms of specific approaches since the aim was to let the reader find themselves more within the tracks of the essence of criticism above all.
Before anything, we should know that art is not to capture necessarily any beautiful, grand, deep, great picture or moments or character or events; it can equally depict something in contrast to those perhaps positive features. What makes it a well-rendered or artistic piece is the integrity of its whole and the means it gets developing by. However, to this innate and structural point, we may add a content or idea or meaning to let it be grouped in comparison or contrast to its peers. But their ranking evaluation should be relative to time, place and the audience or the critic’s taste.
In the first place, About Elly, being a movie, should be highly appreciated for its essential cinematic effects: it seems to be among the rare films in its current domestic cinema that enjoys very proper and artistic visual and sound effects—fantastic camera movements and framing; beautiful scenery captures; a balanced speed in scene shifts; suitable zooms on characters when needed and from peaceful angles and only when wanted; together with proper sound recordings, either of the actors’ voice or the surrounding. Through all these, regardless of its story, the movie helps to give the audience a sweet feeling.
Beyond these cinematic elements— over which, of course, I have got no technical command, and that my views can be simply refuted or perhaps bought by any specialist as such—the movie contains a proper decorum both in its ‘form’ and ‘content’ from a literary-critical point of view.
Let us start with its content. The movie can be divided into two parts: one, treating Elly; the other part, tackling other characters. That is one may grope for its theme either by thinking about Elly, or equally by expressing one’s feelings and views about the others, though they can be not so irrelevant, and that perhaps they work as cause and effect to each other.
One part of ‘others’ is the pack of couples leading an ordinary and representative middle-class life of their country, and now enjoying one of their typical short trips with all happy activities. But against this mediocre caste, they happen to be afflicted with a base, sentimental, hypocrite sickness of mind from which only wise, loving, honest people can survive, regardless of their class or any other feature.
We see that everyone merely starts passing sweet judgments and welcoming comments about Elly—her character, her companionship, and then her celebrated marriage—just to counterblast themselves after the turning point—her disappearance. What is the ground for their harsh opinionated judgments? While the beginning welcome chants can be out of their sentimental and exaggerated excitations, the ending bitter ones are from their inhuman irresponsible cast of mentality.
Though the movie does not aim at an individual characterization of the characters—since it wants to frame them all as a type, perhaps—we can of course draw a very pale differentiating line among them: one is quite detached and irresponsible so that she immediately wants to correct her acknowledging words—and all just in case!—about Elly’s being a suitable match for the marriage. Another is crude and frankly reveals what is passing among them, heedless of the possible pains his words may bring onto others; while there is another one among them who tries to be helpful and goes between them in cases of bitterness. And so on with other characters. But they all share in the above mentioned demerrited qualities, except, of course, Sepide, who not merely because she knows more facts about Elly but since she is a deeper and more understanding figure there in the movie she cannot get herself consistent with others’ harsh judgments. Her humanistic mentality and soul, in addition to her general words and behavior, is already disclosed in simple acts with artistic hues; namely her musical tattoo on the window pane, and not forgetting that the choice of her very name—meaning “white”—could reflect the writer’s conventional or allegorical considerations for something in her being.
Another part of ‘others’ is Elly’s background and family. We get to know that she belongs to a family which seems to be lower than her hosts’, financially or culturally, in a way that she is not allowed or even expected to act freely and take a trip with whomever or in whatever form she likes, despite the fact that she is grown up, earns her own living, and is on the brink of marriage.
One other part of this ‘others’ is her fiancé, whose personality is uncoiled to the audience through his selfish, obsessive and aggressive inquiry into Elly’s faithfulness or not, rather than being worried if she is dead or living.
The last part of ‘others’ can be the simple, servant-like villagers who are in charge of the villa. They carry part of the conventional established values—as is reflected through their outlook toward the newly-wed couple with all their traditional songs and ritual celebrations—and that they shape a broader and contrasting background for all the other packs of the movie. They can embody many a limiting values similar to Elly’s family’s, with a sublimated or civic difference at most. Thus to them, as regards Elly’s relationship, a lie is produced equally and necessarily as it was done against Elly’s family.
The other part of the movie’s interrogation is Elly. For all her almost lower-class family who has retained its firm grab on their daughter’s life, and her unwelcome relation with her fiancé, she has preserved her modest and graceful qualities: she assumes an acceptable place in others’ view, even her fiancé’s who not until the day of the event had not perceived a possible, but already-conceived, breach in their relation.
She is not too blocked to avoid mingling with the other packs: she has even thought of another person for her marriage; she enjoys their companionship, and doesn’t shun their style, from cleaning the house out to their entertaining pantomime-puzzle show at the first night. But the other part of her character is not easily liquidated into their type: she doesn’t join their boisterous deeds in the tunnel; or that at every chance to be by herself she seems to enjoy her loneliness. In short, apart from or perhaps due to her general milieu, she stands between a typical, shallow, ceremonial mentality and a higher, developing, thoughtful, initiated individuality, which she deserves.
Suddenly she disappears. And the movie does not run short of keeping the curious audience guessing thereon for no single moment, and likewise it ends with an open-ended reasoning for the finally apparent cause: death. However, now, two different facts remain as the most possible reasons: she drowned or that she committed suicide.
Though the assumptions for her probable drowning in the sea is accumulated, the binary oppositions—that the drowning kid is rescued—together with the confirmation of coastguards about lack of such a person drowned in the sea in that area, and her dead body finally discovered can tell of her suicide.
It seems the aphoristic sentence uttered by her new suitor—“a bitter ending is better than an endless bitterness”—triggered her existential choice. No doubt her decision can be morally and psychologically approached with perhaps different conclusions. But the stated idea has got a functional force unto her mind, as it had already done for her suitor’s ex-wife’s, with the difference that there it led to divorce, and here, to death perhaps. But both seem to have reached a salvation, in their own view, at least.
But if she drowned—and most probably while rescuing the kid—the irony of situation is no less persistent: she risked her life and finally died looking after their kids, but they began projecting bitter definite opinions about her life, character and status in light of their fragmentary relative information they gradually got about her. And so, the thematic idea of the movie—to show such a girl in contrast and conflict with such a life and others—almost do not alter with any of the possible reasons of her death, except that one would aim at her conscious existential choice—even if not morally or psychologically approved—while the other highlights a naturalistic and deterministic—and not symbolic— incident which ends her would-be anguished real life.
The movie attains a beautiful and artistic value in its form as well. One aspect of its strong structural element is the immediate feeling of restless anxiety in its audience right from the very beginning of the movie. Its music of natural life, scenes with characters in movement while packing up for the journey, clipping dialogues, setting off, country road, shouting in the tunnel, shifts of camera from one character to another, fast but proper speed of the movie can all stimulate the audience toward an expectation of something more than weird. No doubt such an expectation is more concerted in the native audience who shares more social and cultural experiences with the characters, and is already prevailed with a fear about the outcome of such simply free enjoyments and companionships. This sense of anxiety in the advent runs throughout the movie and just gets more sustenance with every event and never fades away. Perhaps it provides the audience with a psychological preparation for confronting the tragic world of the movie.
The modern structure of the movie lies, however, in the episodic revealing of Elly’s character and life, and of course through other characters. Moreover, all characters are paced with a mutual and related speech in relay, and almost nothing is extra and deviated. In other words, all characters and sceneries are appropriately pictured as to suit their planned roles and effects. Indeed, the movie goes well with Edgar Allan Poe’s principles for the short story in that the characters’ acts and speeches are quite relevant to the intended theme of the whole piece. More importantly, almost all dialogues, scenes and actions in the movie are realistically rendered. The characters’ speech and behavior are pretty faithful to their audience’s world, and not at all artificial, like the common bookish and idealistic, if not sentimental, words and debates.
Perhaps the most effective formal invocation of the movie is Elly’s ‘elliptic existence’, I would say. It relies more on her absence than presence, not for a sensational suspense creation, but more for a thoughtful gap in the audience’s learning the truth about Elly’s life and also for her own necessary seclusion for her individuation. And a consequential stream for such a movie is its not explicit resolution, and its leaving the audience to fill the gaps about Elly’s death and its reason, with no degree of degradation of its essential meaning even if assumed other way than suicide, since the realistic world of other characters’ baseness is there intact and furnished with Elly’s pitiful life. In any way, the movie owes its power to the psychological reality about Elly’s character built in the audience’s mind than her physical presence.
One of the power points of the movie’s structure lies in its uncertain ending. It does not limit itself to a clear ending, and therefore Elly is not frozen to the category of suicidal characters to impress her connections ever after, and her audience too, by her weak, immoral and unwise choice, though the other ending assumption, her drowning, can point at her inexperienced, compulsive, silent, and perhaps unrealistic attempt to save the kid with, of course, no result but costing her life. But this equivocal ending can, and perhaps is to be overlooked since the other important part—‘the others’—is there sound and safe. Imagine Elly was schemed to be living there among them again. Their shallow and nasty world would be the same with no dissolved ugliness, and with an equal disgraceful shame on them.
Though the existential meaning of the movie is the most significant one, the moral or allegorical ones have not been ignored. For instance, the aspect of telling lies running throughout the movie has got a balanced form as well. They tell a lie to get their plan proceeded, but unfortunately this process goes on just for a while and does not help in farther points or problems. The archetypal conflict between the false versus the true results in an ultimate defeat for the former in the end; hence soothing the morale seekers.
Moralistically again, the movie can also highlight the fact that love, honesty and faithfulness can transcend the boundaries of actual connections and familiarity despite all their longer and closer privileges: Sepide is closer, more faithful to Elly, and more defensive about her—whose name is not even fully and beyond the nickname known to them—than other couples are about each other interpersonally. And therefore Sepide attains an existential heroism in her very humanitarian choice and treatments and her sense of responsibility.
Still another allegorical import of the movie can be drawn if it is projected upon a broader and social level. The fact that several times during the movie the characters raise a poll among them and seek everyone’s idea about the issue in question before any decision may hint at a democratic community, in which each person is endowed with an equal right, but with the tragic and ironic fact that they already lack an essential humanism, what perhaps does not succeed to be appealing for Elly either.
No doubt symbolic cultivation of some images or actions is to reinforce the intended meaning. The beginning scene of the movie is captured from the inside of a charity box into which, as we get to know later on, Elly inserts a coin to prevent any bad accident and guarantee herself for a safe journey, right upon her innocent and typical belief. And the movie ends with the last scene leaving others struggling to push the stuck orange car out of the beach sands. It could signify their incessant futile life. And that the movie launches its story through the motif of journey to show the progress of them from an innocent empty life to an experienced, flourished and conscious one, with the sea perhaps—as the bed of the development—to be the mysterious destiny lurking there for them. The image of the coastguard boat emerging from the sea while searching for her and shot from the front that fills most part of the screen really gives the audience the sense of coming from the realm of the dead.
And the final conclusion can be that Elly finds herself a misfit in a life laden with insecurity, falsehood, poverty, irresponsibility, and dark future and leaves her way out—from weakness or rationality—for all the considerations she seems to have had about her family, her job, her friends and future married life. Otherwise and if taken out by an accident, she still impinges the same preference in the mind of the audience as for her destiny.
